Herblore

Back somewhere in the misty past of either my graduate school work at Eastern Washington or in the early days of teaching, I came across an essay which suggested that one of the things most useful to keeping a child's interest in the wilderness fresh is to know about it yourself—knowing the names of animals, identifying trees and flowers, and recognizing animal tracks shows that you care about the subject and avoids the frustration of the constant questioning: "Dad, what's that tree?" "I don't know, son; some kind of pine, I think."

Going back even further (and more geekily), one of the minor bits of The Lord of the Rings trilogy I was always enthralled with was Aragorn's knowledge of herbs and plants, as part and parcel of his awesome mastery of all things nature-y. The little exchange between Aragorn and Ioleth in Minas Tirith when he is looking for athelas to cure Eowyn and Merry of their hurt suffered in killing the Lord of the Nazgul (see? I told you it would be geeky...) stuck with me: her not knowing of the plant and suggesting she could speak with the herb-master; he suggesting she may have heard of it as "kingsfoil"—there was something in the knowledge and naming that kindled a desire for knowledge and woodcraft.

Of course, I developed none of those skills. I think at least part of my reawakening to the world of hiking and the outdoors is a drive to gain the mastery that I never did back in Boy Scouts. And it frustrates me no end that as I'm wandering about in the woods, I can't identify anything beyond "pine" or "oak, probably." I've looked at a lot of guides, but some seem terribly dense and contain much extra information (how likely is it that I'll need to know about a sub-genus of creeping vine found only in some remote corner of the Louisiana bayou?); besides, they're often extremely mass-ful for their size and therefore not very good for backpacking. Some are so technical that I'm afraid I won't be able to figure out anything in the field from them; others seem incomplete.

So I decided that something small and local would be a good place to start. A kind pair of folks gave me a $25 gift certificate for the little McCabe & Co. Booksellers in Crestline (with a little note about Luddites and fighting corporate power...), and the other day I picked up two small guides from the San Bernardino Mountains Land Trust: Trees of the San Bernardino Mountains and Wildflowers of the San Bernardino Mountains. They're quite small and though they cover a limited range, they have the basics and I'm happy to support a local cause. With their help, I discovered that the two trees flanking my parents' house aren't just the "pine" and the "oak," but a Ponderosa Pine and a Canyon Live Oak (probably).

The big tree in which I sit when I'm up at Onyx Summit above Big Bear isn't, as I had thought, a pinyon pine, but a Western Juniper. What the little guide didn't tell me was that this was a the australis variant of the Juniperus occidentalis, aka the Sierra Juniper. That's the kind of thing I want to know!

Which brings me back full circle to names and secret names. I like knowing that it's a Sierra Juniper; the name means more than just "Western Juniper" (though knowing its scientific name is "Juniperus occidentalis var. austrails pleases me more than it should). Who wouldn't prefer "False Hemlock" over "Bigcone Douglas-Fir" (Pseudotsuga macrocarpa)? (The hyphen in "Douglas-Fir," by the way, is included because it isn't really a fir tree at all.)

At any rate, I'm hoping to start identifying more growth around our house so that when the boys ask, I'll have an answer: they (like I) may not remember the actual names for the phenomena that their dad taught them, but hopefully they'll remember (as I do) that their dad knows the answer should they need it.